The planet Mars has distinctive areas of chaos terrain, a topography unlike any on Earth. Chaos terrain generally consists of irregular groups of large blocks, some reaching tens of kilometers across and a hundred or more meters high. The tilted and flat topped blocks form depressions hundreds of metres deep. A chaotic region can be recognized by a rat's nest of mesas, buttes, and hills, chopped through with valleys which in places look almost patterned. Some parts of this chaotic area have not collapsed completely—they are still formed into large mesas, so they may still contain water ice. Chaos regions formed long ago. By counting craters (more craters in any given area means an older surface) and by studying the valleys' relations with other geological features, scientists have concluded the channels formed 2.0 to 3.8 billion years ago.
Locations
The greatest concentrations of chaotic terrain are in the same locations as giant, ancient river valleys. Because so many large channels seem to originate from chaotic terrain, it is widely believed that chaos terrain is caused by water coming out the ground in the form of massive floods. Most of the chaotic terrain exists in the highlands of Mars, south of Chryse Planitia, in the Oxia Palus quadrangle, and along the Martian dichotomy. But some chaos regions can be found in Margaritifer Sinus quadrangle, Phaethontis quadrangle, and Lunae Palus quadrangle.
Theories for formation Many different theories have been advanced for how floods of water came to be released with the formation of chaotic terrain. Evidence for the involvement of water has been found—minerals associated with water, such as grey, crystalline hematite and phyllosilicates, are present in chaos regions. Many explanations for the creation of chaos involve the sudden melting of giant reservoirs of ground ice. Some researchers have suggested that a frozen layer, called a cryosphere, developed over a long time period and then something triggered it to rupture and melt suddenly. The rupturing event may have been impacts, magma movements, seismic activity, volcanic tectonic strains, increased pore pressure, or the dissociation of clathrates. A clathrate composed of carbon dioxide and methane could have explosively dissociated, thereby liquefying water-saturated sediments. A variation of this idea of a cryosphere is that an aquifer was created along with the cryosphere. As more and more ice was added resulting in a thicker cryosphere, the water in the aquifer became pressurized. When something like an impact or movement of magma broke or melted the cryosphere, floods of water under great pressure were released. However, further calculations showed that the great channels could not have been produced with just a single discharge. Later proposals advanced the notion that the geological shapes present in chaos regions could have been made by a series of over 100 flooding events.
Melting of buried ice More recently, researchers have suggested ways for the formation of chaos without the need for a special triggering event. Tanja Zegers and others calculated that the simple burial of ice-rich sediments could result in the release of huge amounts of water leading to the formation of the large river basins that are associated with most chaos terrains. The group studied Aram Chaos, a large region of chaos that probably began as a large impact crater. In their model, ice-rich material accumulated in the crater and then became covered with sediment, which prevented the ice from disappearing into the thin atmosphere. Eventually, the heat from the deep subsurface together with the insulating qualities of the covering layer produced a thick water layer. Since dense materials tend to sink into water, the overlying rock broke under the strain. The dense, rocky cap fractured into various sized, tilted blocks. The melt water went to the top and made a channel which eroded more and more as water rushed outward. Along with water from other chaotic regions, there would have been enough erosive force to carve the large river valleys we now observe. There is ample evidence for buried deposits of ice in the form of glaciers, preserved under a thin covering of rock and dirt.
It also seems that Mars has had many ice ages in which ice was deposited, then later buried. These ice ages are caused by the frequent large changes in the tilt of the planet. The tilt of the spin axis of Mars is highly variable due to the lack of a large moon. Observations of many craters have shown that many craters are mostly full of sediments—ice could be one of the sediments. Many craters appear to be very shallow, but observations of younger craters have demonstrated that impact craters start out as sort of bowl shaped; hence a crater that today looks shallow has probably been filled with sediments. Research, published by Rodriguez and others in 2005, suggested that the subsurface of Mars contains an accumulation of old craters that may be filled with water or ice.
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